For the record, are there any actual military organizations which do this?
When I was a cadet, we used male/female specific verbiage. I never thought about this too much when watching BSG, but I do now wonder what the precise reasons are for making use of this naming system...
And, for the record, I'm going to say that it being "canon" in FS doesn't count. Volition assumably made the assumption that the user-base would primarily be male, and thus did not feel the need to make a gender-select system (apart from choosing your pilot image). Furthermore, doing so would require significantly more difficult VA work, which would cost more, use more disk space, etc. In short, it was conveniant do it the way they did it - it doesn't mean that that's the way it really is in the FS-verse.